And yet, I am here!

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Halina Nelken was a precocious teenager, living a middle-class life in Krakow. Like other girls her age, she recorded her personal observations and feelings in a diary. As conditions in Krakow deteriorated and her family was forced into the Jewish ghetto, she continued to write, eventually smuggling her diary out with a Catholic friend. This remarkable book tells the story of Nelken's experiences in the ghetto and later in eight Nazi concentration camps, including Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Ravensbruck. Her diary entries, written between 1938 and 1943, form the core of the volume and are supplemented by recollections written shortly after the war and by later commentaries and explanatory notes which she added in the mid-1980s. Although there exist numerous published and unpublished memoirs by Holocaust survivors, Nelken's book presents one of the few extant diaries written at the time.

Year

1999

Language

English

Publisher

University of Massachusetts Press

Editions

1

Pages

304

ISBN

9781558492929

Data source: Wikidata